Visual Essay
From the persistence of the autofiction literary genre to our constant digital self-documentation, the diary is a more present metaphor than we often realize. It lies at the core of French artist Thomas Cap de Ville’s practice, in which his obsessive collecting of ephemera, souvenirs, relics, narratives, sketches, and memories takes new life in the form of bookish sculptural altars.
Thomas Cap de Ville (born 1978) lives and works in Paris. His practice draws on the notion of inner worlds and the obsessive collection of objects. Traces are the primary resource of his work, paying tribute to the adolescence and early adulthood of the late 1990s and early 2000s counterculture. Thomas Cap de Ville started out in fashion and created videos in collaboration with various musicians, including La Chatte. His work was later included in collective projects, such as at the Fondation Cartier (Paris, 2011). He held his first solo exhibitions at Goswell Road (Paris, 2017 and 2019). In 2020, he was artist-in-residence at Confort Moderne (Poitiers), where he presented his first institutional solo exhibition. Since then, his work has been featured in solo exhibitions such as Splut, Exo Exo (Paris, 2021 and 2022); INTERLOPE, Galeria Miroslav Kraljevic (Zagreb, 2022), and in institutional group exhibitions at CRAC Alsace (Altkirch, 2024); CRÉDAC (Ivry-sur-Seine, 2024); Kunsthalle Praha (Prague, 2023); FRAC Corsica (Corte, 2023), as well as in group shows in galleries including Mendes Wood (Brussels, 2022); Colette Mariana (Barcelona, 2022); and Galerie Hussenot (Paris, 2020).
All images courtesy the artist.
It’s the end of summer and that’s perfectly fine with me. I am leaving the country this year. I have neither heart nor money, and above all my stepbrother needed me; he had surgery. They removed a cancerous growth from the tip of his penis. I stayed by his side, but no beach because he was not allowed to enter the sea.
Julian has been dead for two years already, but that doesn’t matter at all, at least as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I don’t even know why I talk about it. Otherwise things are moving around me, people are scattering instead of uniting. I could really use a protector! What shakes me the most is the pain linked to knowledge.
I know we would still be friends, but that’s not the case and I deeply regret it of course. Apart from that, I keep purging—voluntarily or not, I don’t really know, but I don’t fight it anymore. I let him take myself over, jiggling me in all directions. You are abused, things hit you and it hurts to the core, but you don’t die. I fired everyone and it feels so good.
HOWWAUH! What an intense week it has been! I must have lost one kilogram at least! Endlessly, constantly, mercilessly, and upside down. Future, past, present, I barely sleep anymore, I mean compared to the way it used to be. I don’t go to bed before daybreak, then I jump for hours.
I find it hard to shed this contempt for my own existence. Despite everything, I understand that my adoration for complaint is a luxury, certainly, but sterile. Also, a tarot reading put me back where I belong, as the Yi King had already done in the past. In short, I know now that wasting my time whining will only make me stagnate, or even wither.
Visual Essay
finanziato dall'Unione Europea - Next Generation EU
